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Aspergillus Sydowii and Other Potential Fungal Pathogens in Gorgonian Octocorals of the Ecuadorian Pacific

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Aspergillus Sydowii and Other Potential Fungal Pathogens in Gorgonian Octocorals of the Ecuadorian Pacific RESEARCH ARTICLE Aspergillus sydowii and Other Potential Fungal Pathogens in Gorgonian Octocorals of the Ecuadorian Pacific M. Mar Soler-Hurtado1,2, Jose Vladimir Sandoval-Sierra3, Annie Machordom1, Javier DieÂguez-Uribeondo3* 1 Departamento de Biodiversidad y BiologõÂa Evolutiva, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN- CSIC), Madrid, Spain, 2 Departamento de Biodiversidad y EcologõÂa de Invertebrados Marinos, Facultad de BiologõÂa, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain, 3 Departamento de MicologõÂa, Real JardõÂn BotaÂnico CSIC, a11111 Madrid, Spain * [email protected] Abstract Emerging fungal diseases are threatening ecosystems and have increased in recent OPEN ACCESS decades. In corals, the prevalence and consequences of these infections have also Citation: Soler-Hurtado MM, Sandoval-Sierra JV, increased in frequency and severity. Coral reefs are affected by an emerging fungal disease Machordom A, DieÂguez-Uribeondo J (2016) Aspergillus sydowii and Other Potential Fungal named aspergillosis, caused by Aspergillus sydowii. This disease and its pathogen have Pathogens in Gorgonian Octocorals of the been reported along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Colombia. Despite this, an impor- Ecuadorian Pacific. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0165992. tant number of coral reefs worldwide have not been investigated for the presence of this doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165992 pathogen. In this work, we carried out the surveillance of the main coral reef of the Ecuador- Editor: Kenneth SoÈderhaÈll, Uppsala University, ian Pacific with a focus on the two most abundant and cosmopolitan species of this ecosys- SWEDEN tem, Leptogorgia sp. and Leptogorgia obscura. We collected 59 isolates and obtained the Received: September 20, 2016 corresponding sequences of the Internal Transcribed Spacers (ITS) of the ribosomal DNA. Accepted: October 22, 2016 These were phylogenetically analyzed using MrBayes, which indicated the presence of two Published: November 30, 2016 isolates of the coral reef pathogen A. sydowii, as well as 16 additional species that are potentially pathogenic to corals. Although the analyzed gorgonian specimens appeared Copyright: © 2016 Soler-Hurtado et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of healthy, the presence of these pathogens, especially of A. sydowii, alert us to the potential the Creative Commons Attribution License, which risk to the health and future survival of the Pacific Ecuadorian coral ecosystem under the permits unrestricted use, distribution, and current scenario of increasing threats and stressors to coral reefs, such as habitat alter- reproduction in any medium, provided the original ations by humans and global climate change. author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Cultures were labeled as ASP001 through ASP059 in the culture collection of the Real JardõÂn BotaÂnico, Madrid, Spain. The molecular data are published in GenBank (GenBank number are included in the Introduction manuscript). Coral reefs are considered one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the marine realm Funding: This research was only partially [1]. They maintain a high biomass and abundance of varied organisms [2] and provide a pleth- supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of ora of micro-habitats to support enormous biodiversity [3±6]. In recent decades, coral reefs Economy and Competitiveness (CTM2014-57949- R). The authors have not had any additional have experienced increasing pressures, and are disturbed by a combination of direct human funding and coauthors have supported the impacts, e.g., habitat fragmentation and reduction of functional diversity [7], and global cli- sampling and sequencing from other projects. mate change, e.g., increasing ocean acidification and temperature, coral bleaching, etc. [8]. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0165992 November 30, 2016 1 / 12 A. sydowii Gorgonians Ecuador Both author and coauthors have currently not These conditions make reefs more susceptible to the proliferation and development of oppor- funding to pay publication fees. tunistic organisms, which take advantage of the weakened corals [9,10]. Competing Interests: The authors have declared The coral disease aspergillosis has produced significant deterioration and partial and mas- that no competing interests exist. sive mortalities of coral communities in the Caribbean Sea [11±15]. The responsible pathogen is the ascomycetous fungus Aspergillus sydowii (Bainier and Sartory, 1926). The first report of this disease in gorgonians dates back to 1995 [14,15], although similar symptoms and out- breaks had been previously reported in the 1980s [16]. The ascomycete fungus A. sydowii is globally distributed and occurs in diverse environments where it survives as a soil decompos- ing saprotroph [17±19]. It is apparently a terrestrial fungus, but it is salt tolerant and capable of growing in the sea [20]. Moreover, A. sydowii has been reported as a food contaminant [21], and a human pathogen in immune-compromised patients [22,23]. In marine ecosystems, A. sydowii has been isolated from some gorgonian communities of the Caribbean [11,24], Colom- bian Pacific coasts [25], and environmental samples of the Australian coastal waters [20]. Aspergillosis causes selective mortality of large sea fans [26], and suppression of reproduc- tion in infected individuals [27]. As a consequence, coral population levels decrease [28]. The symptoms include purpling of the tissue, galling, and lesions [11], associated with necrotic sea fan tissue [14]. Prevalence (percentage of fans infected) and disease severity (mean percentage of fan tissue affected by disease) are positively correlated with water depth, and large sea fans are more likely to be infected than small fans [15,29]. Although the origin of this disease and its epidemiology is unknown, microsatellites and phylogenetic studies reveal a pattern of global panmixia among isolates. Moreover, sea isolates are interspersed with those isolated from environmental samples [30]. Aspergillus sydowii was isolated, identified and inoculated as the causative agent of the sea fan disease (Koch's postulates) by previous authors [11,19]. The inci- dence of this pathogen can be similar to other fungal species, i.e., Fusarium keratoplasticum and F. falciforme, in other animals and ecosystems [31], exacerbated by the effects of global cli- mate change and habitat alteration by humans. In the Ecuadorian Pacific, there are no records of A. sydowii and coral reefs appear to be healthy. Due to the current trend of expansion of fungal infections and the endangered situa- tion of coral reefs, we performed a survey in the Machalilla gorgonian gardens, which includes the most representative gorgonian species in a hot spot of marine biodiversity in Ecuador. We investigated the presence of A. sydowii in these organisms. Material and Methods Sampling Gorgonian octocoral colonies were collected by SCUBA diving from rocky bottoms located in The Frailes, Machalilla National Park (ManabõÂ, Ecuador) (1Ê30'14"S 80Ê48'33ºW). The author- ity who issued the permission for each location was the "Ministerio del Ambiente, Manabõ (ECUADOR)" (Permit Number: NÊ 016 ±RM±DPM±MA). Due to the absence of symptoms, we randomly selected 40 colonies from the two most abundant and cosmopolitan gorgonian species of this area (pers. obs.), Leptogorgia Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1857 [32]: Leptogorgia obscura Bielschowsky, 1929 [33], and Leptogorgia sp. (under description). The colonies were collected within a range of 10 to 15 m in depth. Samples were kept in individual sterile plastic bags and processed in the laboratory under axenic conditions. Fungal isolation From each colony, fragments of ca. 3 cm wide from randomly selected areas were excised using a sterile scalpel. To remove fungi not associated with the octocorals, the selected frag- ments were surface-sterilized with 70% ethanol for 30 s [25]. For fungal isolations, the selected PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0165992 November 30, 2016 2 / 12 A. sydowii Gorgonians Ecuador fragments were transferred onto a peptone glucose agar media (PGA) [34] supplemented with penicillin (100 mg/l). In order to avoid any possible errors in the identification of coral fungi (negative control) the sea water sample was isolated. A glass-ring technique was used for isola- tion following the methodology described in [31]. Resulting pure cultures were maintained in PGA at 4ÊC. Cultures were labeled as ASP001 through ASP059 in the culture collection of the Real JardõÂn BotaÂnico, Madrid, Spain (Table 1). DNA extraction, PCR amplification, sequencing, and species identification DNA was extracted from 20 mg of the fungal isolate tissues using the DNeasy extraction kit (Qiagen, Inc.) according to the manufacturer's protocol. DNA fragments containing internal transcribed spacers ITS1 and ITS2, including 5.8S, were amplified and sequenced with primer pair ITS5/ITS4 [35]. The PCR profile was: 2.5 μl 10 x buffer, 1.4 μl 50 mM MgCl2, 1.6 μl 25 mM dNTPs, 0.5 μl of each 10 mM primer (forward and reverse), 1 μl 1 mg/ml BSA, 1 μl DNA, 0.3 μl 5 U/μl Taq polymerase, and 16.2 μl ddH2O. The PCR conditions were 1 min at 95ÊC, 35 cycles of 1 min at 95ÊC, 45 s at 58ÊC and 1 min at 72ÊC, and finally 10 min at 72ÊC. The ampli- cons were sequenced for both strands using BigDye Terminator in an ABI 3730 genetic ana- lyzer (Applied Biosystems). The sequences were edited and primers trimmed using the Sequencher v.4.9 program (Gene Code Corporation, Ann Arbor, MI, USA). BLAST [36] was used to compare the sequences against those existing in the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI) nucleotide databases. For species identification of the isolates, the corresponding ITS sequences were phylogenet- ically analyzed with a number of selected ITS sequences of reference of closely related fungal species obtained from the NCBI (see Table 2, Fig 1). To perform the phylogenetic analyses, a GTR + G + I substitution model was first obtained using the jModelTest v2.1.5 [37] program. This model was selected based on the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Bayesian inference and Maximum Likelihood analyses were performed using MrBayes v3.2.5 [38] and RaxML v8.0.0 [39], respectively.
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